As I've noted elsewhere, it's complicated, much more complicated than you're representing it here. Nobody else researches specific areas that the military has to. Elsewhere I used the under-body explosion example, but there are many others. Let's say, RPGs. They hit a vehicle in a very specific way. Who is going to research materials and construction methods to best defend occupants against RPG strikes? Who is going to have a person on staff with a doctorate who is a, if not the, world expert on uniforms and how they interact with the human body, equipment, vehicles, etc.? Only the Army (with benefit to the other services, of course).
I'm not saying earmarks don't happen. It's not my area (I do public affairs for the Army RD&E command, not budget), so I couldn't say without doing some research that I'm not going to do on a Thursday night while on vacation. However, we have several systems set up to respond to requests from the field, requests from doctrine writers (who write how the Army should work, hence what capabilities it will need), and others. We even take troop designs and get them manufactured. We now have a shop in Afghanistan where soldiers can pull up and get things made for a specific purpose. And we have guys researching things that might be needed 10 or 20 years from now.
Full disclosure: I do public affairs for the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.
I can't speak for the other services, but the Army created RDECOM about 8 years ago to make RD&E work better for Soldiers. One big task is having what they call a balanced portfolio that spans basic research through engineering work. The command has more than 16,000 people, more than 10,000 of them civilian engineers or scientists. A lot of smart people put a lot of thought into this. It is not transparent, even to me, for a lot of reasons. Some of it is secret, but some of it is just so particular to the military, or even one part of the Army. For example, under-body explosions. There's a lot of research into head-on collisions, etc., but who else would need to study how to protect people from an under-body explosion? And how transparent is that, and should that be, to people outside the military? And who else is going to work on a material that might be suitable for that kind of thing? And how, pre-Iraq/Afghanistan, do you see that coming as the next big threat or design a research program that can respond to something like that which no one sees coming?
Which is not to say none of our research transfers into the civilian economy, for example flexible display technology, robotics and nanotechnology. We're working on moving our basic overview onto the web, but it shows we have more than 1,000 partnerships of one kind or another with everything from universities and foreign defense agencies to individual researchers and at least one time two guys in a garage.
As it happens, the Army just finished another study on how RD&E should work. The results should be out soon and may mean some level of reorganization. Stay tuned if you're interested.
"With the internet, though, newspapers are no longer local, so all the newspapers compete on the internet with each other, and there is no real bottom to the cost."
I think you stated the solution as a negative fact. Newspapers can be local. In fact, they need to be local, because local is a value they can add to the equation. They can still gather and arrange facts better than anybody, and they can still get access and sell the product of that access. People will still pay for that.
What they can't do is all compete as national/international publications anymore. They could do that when there were only a few choices, first, the two or three local big papers, and later the one big local paper and the national papers flown or satellited in: NY Times, USA Today, etc. So Muncie or Syracuse could have a national/international publication with what they did supplemented by the news services.
The internet kills that by putting all those pseudo-national publications in the same market, and there's just not a market for that many national papers. And the Muncies and Syracuses can't compete with the NY Times and the Washington Post at the national and international level.
The market I think we need to look at is magazines. The old truism was that there was a market for three major publications on any subject: Road & Track, Car & Driver and Motor Trend. Usually there were two biggies and a third guy trailing and doing things differently. After the big three you went niche: magazines dedicated to Porsches, local or regional mags, British roadsters, muscle cars, etc. They all did fine, but they didn't challenge the big guys.
So if that's the model we're headed for, you'll get your big three -- NY Times, Washington Post and one other one, take your pick from a half dozen -- and a bunch of niche papers: Wall Street Journal, papers smart enough to be very local, maybe a Kansas City paper or a Mountain states paper for their regions, that kind of thing. I can envision a tier, actually: your local paper that will sit through the town hall meetings and catch the locals in graft and corruption; the state or regional paper that has resources the locals don't and knows its area better and will cover grain prices or water rights issues, and has access the NY Times doesn't and doesn't want to provide; and a national paper.
They just need to figure out a model quickly and kick the bean counters the hell out of the office suites. In gradual school I read a study about the second papers in major cities and how they died. In every case they weren't making enough money, so they cut staff and/or pages (or color, or paper quality, whatever) to protect the profit margin. The readers noticed they were getting less value and defected, which made advertisers go and/or rates drop, and so the papers made cuts to protect the profit margin. It was a death cycle that they didn't figure out and eventually the big paper in town bought them out. The exception that proved the rule was one paper run by the heir to the family tradition who said to hell with it and added reporters. The readers noticed and sales went up and that paper ended up devouring the one that had been bigger. But bean counters will never get it. It's what they did to GM (cut costs and therefore quality to increase margins and be amazed when nobody wants to buy your cars). You see it day after day in corporate America. Bean counters don't know what you do, they don't know quality when they see it, but they can count and they know everyone in business is supposed to bow to the great god of profit.
It's not that I'm against profit, but you've got to make money doing a good job at what you do. If the recurring financial bubble fiascoes teach us anything, it should be that bankers, accountants and these all-purpose managers aren't the answer to anything in particular, even banks.
Disclaimer: I am a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Army Research, Development & Engineering Command as well as a long-time Slashdot reader & member.
The Army does accomplish a lot of the work through universities and businesses, but we also employ somewhere around 9,000 civilian scientists and engineers in RDECOM, many of whom are working on what we call wearable power. I invite all of you to check out our web site at http://www.army.mil/info/organization/unitsandcommands/commandstructure/rdecom/index.html. You'll see a couple of partnership stories about what we're doing with Microsoft and a NASCAR team, but we have thousands of partnerships and more than 300 international agreements. We also do a lot of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) educational outreach. Check out eCybermission https://ecybermission.apgea.army.mil/, though that's not our only effort.
We are the headquarters and have subordinate commands that do the actual research and development. So check out our subordinate elements page, http://www.rdecom.army.mil/pages/rdecom_elements.html, to see more about what they do. Basically, we do everything from basic research through places like the Army Research Laboratory and the Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center, right through to prototyping and even some production at our Product Integration Facilities. Probably the most well-known of our subordinates is the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, which does things like MREs, uniforms, helmets, tentage, etc.
I'll apologize up front about our web page. The front page has been transitioned to the new Army.mil look and feel, but we're just beginning to convert our other pages. We're also making baby steps into social media, so we're on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. The YouTube channel includes a handful of videos from our scientists and engineers talking about what they do. Links are on our home page.
And I guess I should mention that the other services have similar commands. I'm sure Google will be glad to help you find them.
I have fought this battle for years, first as a Mac user, and now as a Linux user. It's partly just another aspect of MS co-opting the whole ecosystem. Many Army IT people are MSCEs, and they predictably find Microsoft solutions for pretty much every problem. But there is a good reason this plays so well in the Army.
The thing is, you have to understand what a huge undertaking we're talking about. Bases all over the world, large and small, techs who transfer from one base to the next all the time, bases having to compete for techs in the open market (are there enough Linux techs for the Army to hire out there? Can it retrain its whole IT corps in Linux?), acquisition laws that limit what you can buy and how you go about it, interoperability with the rest of the government and allies, and so on. Also, if you look at the user base, one of the DoD's concerns is that so many people are nearing retirement age. You think they'd be easy to get to use something new? Even that MSCE certification plays a legitimate role, in that verifiable certifications/degrees/etc. play well in government bureaucratic hiring processes -- and those rules are good things to have for fairness reasons. The Army thrives on interchangeable, interoperable parts and bureaucratic solutions that can work in many settings, so breaking into the system is not easy. A company that digs into the process and figures out how to make it work for them does well. Long-hairs bent on revolution don't.
Believe me, it irks me to no end to be told they're locking down another function on my machine because of security, and occasionally I'll remind them that if they were actually interested in security I'd be running OpenBSD or SELinux. Mostly I get the 1000-meter stare at that point. Once in a while I get surprised agreement, and that's the guy I call from then on to keep my box in good order.
But there are cracks appearing. It's just going to be slow given the nature of the beast.
We have a saying about the futility of trying to teach a pig to sing: it wastes your time and annoys the pig. Pick whichever role you prefer. My point is there very likely no hope of engaging someone who is obviously anti-American and writing from a
The fact is you raise some good points, then you ruin it by working them hard to make the U.S. sound like the sole force for evil in the universe. Like both ends of the the U.S. political spectrum, you seem to need to demonize the other side. That's unfortunate, as it betrays either a lack of intellect or a lack of intellectual honesty. Or maybe you just can't resist a good dig and didn't feel like going on forever with qualifications and analogies and whatnot. Slashdot is hardly a good medium for psychoanalysis.
The U.S. does what it needs to do in what it sees as its own interest, just like every other sane nation on earth. France is certainly a good example of that. In fact, the last Frenchman I talked to (I realize I don't know that you're actually French) explained that the French knew the U.S. was going to lose in Iraq because they had already tried and failed to do what the U.S. was trying (after a lengthy period of colonization, no less). Unfortunately, every major nation and most of the minor ones can point to the same behavior at some point in their history. And while I'm sure many claim enlightenment now, history shows that such enlightenment doesn't survive long when people see what they define as their national interests being threatened.
I hope Iraq is the last war we get involved in, and that once we're out of there that's the last shot fired in anger in the world. While we're waiting for that to come true, why don't you go visit Seoul and then Pyongyang and then write me about the mistakes we've made. I've woken up to the North Korean propaganda coming across the DMZ and seen the 90-pound soldiers who washed across the river into the South and threatened suicide rather than be taken by the South Korean forces (the bastards gave them their first good meal in months and repatriated them). My first wife grew up an orphan because she was separated from her family during the exodus from Seoul in 1950. Hangkook mal chokum ha say yo. So while I'm tempted to go point-for-point with you, I know that you know dick about the Korean War, and yet you didn't let that stop you from weighing in with a very strong opinion. So I doubt your knowledge of current events is any better, or that your lack of knowledge would stop you from writing another broadside against the U.S. So I'll resist the temptation and go back to reading tech stories on Slashdot (love that Zenwalk, btw). You can sit back and wait to see how universally noble and law-abiding everyone is when the non-Europeans in France outnumber the actual French and start telling them how to run the country.
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.